1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to a cursor control method and an apparatus, and more particularly to a method and an apparatus for controlling a user interactive cursor shown on an image display.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional pointer positioning device and method is disclosed in Taiwan Patent No. 588258 and entitled “A photographic pointer positioning device”. It utilizes a photographic pointer positioning device to process the image out-line so as to obtain coordinate values of four corners of display area, and then obtain the coordinate values corresponding to the aiming point of a video camera by coordinate calculating process so as to replace the method of obtaining the coordinate values of the aiming point by aiming point signals and synchronizing signals utilized in the traditional light gun system. However in practical use, although this method can be applied to any types of image display for playing shooting games with the photographic pointer positioning device without being limited by the type of image display, the image recognition process of the display area detected by video camera is still complicated due to containing pictures shown on the image display. Furthermore, the video camera has to detect the whole display area no matter which point is aimed by the photographic pointer positioning device; therefore the method further has the problem of needing a video camera with large viewing angle.
A conventional cursor control method is disclosed in Taiwan Patent Publication No. 200540687 and entitled “Apparatus for cursor control and method thereof”, wherein a method for cursor control using a hand-held device is provided. First, a movement is detected by the hand-held device. A position differential is calculated according to the detected movement. Then, the hand-held device transmits the position differential to a specific device wirelessly to control cursor activity accordingly, and operate application software on the specific device according to the cursor activity. However in practical use, when the hand-held device is used by a user to detect an image area, image positions will be obviously affected according to different distances between the hand-held device and the objects to be captured and different rotation angles of the hand-held device during photographing. If the distance and rotation angle variations are not corrected, errors may be generated during the calculation of the position differential. Furthermore, since the images detected by the hand-held device include other objects, e.g. pictures shown on a display screen, image recognition is complicated.
According to the above reasons, it is necessary to further improve the aforementioned cursor control method and apparatus so as to solve the problems existed in the art.